{"id":30523,"date":"2026-01-21T17:30:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T14:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bicakhukuk.com\/?p=30523"},"modified":"2026-01-24T16:32:32","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T13:32:32","slug":"more-judges-do-not-mean-better-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bicakhukuk.com\/en\/more-judges-do-not-mean-better-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"More Judges Do Not Mean Better Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. Introduction<\/span><\/h3>\n

Over the past two decades, judicial systems across many jurisdictions have undergone a marked process of quantitative expansion. One of the most visible dimensions of this trend has been the steady increase in the number of judges relative to population size. This expansion is commonly justified through the language of access to justice<\/em>, court congestion, and rising litigation rates. The underlying assumption is both intuitive and powerful: more judges should translate into faster proceedings, better protection of rights, and improved overall quality of justice. <\/span>Yet empirical and experiential evidence increasingly suggests that this assumption may be incomplete, and in some contexts fundamentally misleading. In several countries, rapid growth in judicial personnel has not produced a commensurate improvement in key performance indicators such as the length of proceedings, compliance with the right to a fair trial, public trust in the judiciary, or the effective resolution of disputes. On the contrary, judicial expansion has often coincided with persistent backlogs, recurring violations of the \u201creasonable time<\/em>\u201d requirement, and declining confidence in the justice system.<\/span><\/p>\n

This paradox is particularly salient in the case of T\u00fcrkiye. Over the last decade, the number of judges has increased at a pace that outstrips population growth and exceeds the rate observed in many comparable jurisdictions. However, this quantitative expansion has not been accompanied by a proportional enhancement in judicial performance or in the perceived legitimacy of the justice system. Despite the growing size of the judiciary, litigation volumes remain high, delays persist, and structural problems related to dispute resolution continue to reproduce themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

This article starts from a simple but often overlooked premise: a high number of disputes should not be treated as an indicator of a healthy society, nor should high litigation rates be regarded as a self-evident justification for expanding judicial capacity. On the contrary, persistently elevated levels of litigation may signal deeper dysfunctions in individual-individual, individual-society, and individual-state relations. When courts are systematically required to resolve conflicts that could otherwise be prevented or mitigated through social norms, education, administrative responsibility, or non-judicial mechanisms, the judiciary risks being transformed from a last resort<\/em> into a routine instrument of social regulation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Building on this premise, the article advances a critical distinction between two ideal-typical models of justice. The first is the Community-Supported Justice Model, in which social cohesion, ethical norms, effective public administration, and legal minimalism collectively reduce the demand for adjudication. In this model, courts intervene exceptionally, and judicial authority is preserved precisely because it is not overused. The second is what this article conceptualizes as the Occupational Force \/ Dispute-Driven Justice Model<\/a>. In this latter configuration, judicial institutions increasingly depend on the persistence and normalization of disputes – criminal, civil, and administrative – as a condition of institutional continuity, professional reproduction, and bureaucratic legitimacy. <\/span>Originally developed to analyze the dynamics of criminal justice systems, the Occupational Force Model<\/a> is here extended to encompass the entire justice system, including civil and administrative adjudication. The central claim is not that judges intentionally create disputes, but rather that a judicial system structured around constant dispute absorption may gradually lose its capacity to reduce conflict at the societal level. In such a system, rising litigation rates and expanding judicial staffing become mutually reinforcing phenomena, while underlying social and administrative pathologies remain unaddressed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Against this background, the article pursues three interrelated objectives. First, it situates the contemporary debate on judge density and access to justice within a broader socio-legal and institutional framework, highlighting the limits of capacity-based approaches that equate justice with adjudicatory volume. Second, it provides a comparative analysis of judge-to-population ratios across selected jurisdictions – namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Canada, Japan, China, and T\u00fcrkiye – using the most recent available data. Third, it evaluates whether increases in judicial capacity correlate with meaningful improvements in judicial performance, focusing on indicators such as the reasonable length of proceedings, rights violations, public trust, and case backlogs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Methodologically, the article deliberately refrains from treating litigation rates as an independent justification for judicial expansion. Instead, high dispute volumes are interpreted as a variable that itself requires explanation. From this perspective, expanding the judiciary in response to rising litigation risks addressing the symptom rather than the cause, and may inadvertently entrench a system that becomes structurally dependent on dispute inflation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The article proceeds as follows. Section II develops the theoretical framework, elaborating the contrast between community-supported justice and the occupational force model of adjudication. Section III outlines the methodology, data sources, and comparative approach. Section IV presents the empirical findings on judge density and judicial performance. Section V discusses these findings in light of existing access-to-justice literature and institutional theories. Section VI concludes with policy-oriented reflections, emphasizing dispute prevention, social investment, and the normative repositioning of courts as institutions of last resort rather than permanent instruments of conflict management.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Theoret\u0131cal Framework<\/span><\/h3>\n

2.1. Justice Systems Between Capacity and Social Function<\/span><\/h4>\n

Contemporary discussions on judicial reform are predominantly framed through the language of capacity<\/em>. Concepts such as access to justice, court congestion, judicial efficiency, and case clearance rates dominate both academic and policy-oriented debates (OECD, 2019; World Bank, 2022<\/em>). Within this paradigm, the justice system is primarily conceived as a service provider, and its effectiveness is measured by its ability to process an increasing volume of disputes within acceptable timeframes.\u00a0<\/span>This capacity-centered understanding, while analytically convenient, risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why disputes reach the judiciary in such quantities in the first place. By focusing on throughput rather than on the social and institutional origins of conflict, prevailing frameworks implicitly treat rising litigation as an exogenous and neutral phenomenon. As a result, judicial expansion is often presented as a technical necessity rather than as a choice with normative and structural consequences.<\/span><\/p>\n

Socio-legal scholarship, however, has long emphasized that courts do not merely respond to social conflicts but also shape the incentives, expectations, and behaviors that generate them (Galanter, 1974; Friedman, 1985<\/em>). Judicial institutions are embedded within broader social, cultural, and administrative ecosystems, and their quantitative growth cannot be analytically detached from transformations occurring within those systems.<\/span><\/p>\n

2.2. Disputes as a Structural Variable, Not a Natural Constant<\/span><\/h4>\n

A central assumption challenged in this article is the notion that high litigation rates reflect heightened legal awareness or democratic maturity. While access to legal remedies is undeniably a cornerstone of the rule of law, persistent and systemic dispute inflation may equally indicate deficiencies in social cohesion, administrative accountability, and non-judicial conflict resolution mechanisms (World Justice Project, 2019<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n

From a sociological perspective, disputes are not natural constants but socially produced phenomena. Their frequency and form depend on factors such as education, cultural norms, trust, institutional design, and the perceived legitimacy of public authority (Ellickson, 1991; Tyler, 2006)<\/em>. When these elements weaken, courts are increasingly called upon to compensate for failures occurring elsewhere in the social order. <\/span>In this sense, expanding judicial capacity in response to rising litigation may amount to institutionalizing dysfunction rather than resolving it. The judiciary absorbs conflicts that originate in the erosion of social norms, ineffective governance, or regulatory overreach, thereby relieving other institutions of the pressure to reform. Over time, this dynamic risks transforming courts from mechanisms of last resort into default arenas of routine social and administrative interaction.<\/span><\/p>\n

2.3. The Community-Supported Justice Model<\/span><\/h4>\n

Against this background, the Community-Supported Justice Model represents an ideal-typical framework in which adjudication is embedded within a broader architecture of dispute prevention. In this model, the demand for judicial intervention is structurally constrained by robust social norms, effective public administration, and accessible non-judicial mechanisms of conflict resolution. <\/span>Key features of this model include:<\/span><\/p>\n